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ABOUT THE REPORT Elizabeth F. Thompson Elizabeth F. Thompson, associate professor of history at the University of Virginia, was a Jennings Randolph fellow at USIP in 2007–08. This report, drawn from her forthcoming book, Seeking Justice in the Middle East, builds bridges between two worlds that have remained separate in recent years: academic +VTUJDF*OUFSSVQUFE history of the Middle East and foreign policymaking in the region. The author thanks USIP for its support, Meagan Bridges for her research assistance, and commentators on previous )JTUPSJDBM1FSTQFDUJWFTPO1SPNPUJOH%FNPDSBDZ drafts: Nathan Brown, David Edelstein, Melvyn Leffler, Jeff Legro, William Quandt, Abdul-Karim Rafeq, Barbara Slavin, Bob Vitalis, David Waldner, and audiences at the History JOUIF.JEEMF&BTU Department at Catholic University of America, the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University, the Women’s Foreign Policy Group, and the Woodrow Wilson Center, all in Washington, D.C. 4VNNBSZ t Foreign affairs experts routinely use historical analogy to develop and justify policy. However, as professional historians have long noted, attractive analogies often lead to bad policies. Officials regularly choose analogies that neglect or distort the his- torical case they aim to illuminate. Nonetheless, history can be used effectively in international relations. t To do so, practitioners must first recognize the difference between historical analogy ªCZUIF6OJUFE4UBUFT*OTUJUVUFPG1FBDF and precedent. Historical precedent, drawn from the past of the region in question, "MMSJHIUTSFTFSWFE is a safer guide to policy than historical analogy, which is based on comparisons to events in other regions. Because historical precedent is a self-limiting form of anal- ogy restricted to a certain place, people, and time, it provides a better indication of how a certain society understands and responds to a given situation. t The recent U.S. intervention in highlights the misuses of history: American lead- ers employed analogies to World War II to justify the invasion and to predict success in establishing a democratic regime after. These analogies proved to be a poor guide to nation building in the short term. In the long term, they have deeply aggravated

SPECIAL REPORT 225 JUNE 2009 U.S. relations with Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world. t A more effective use of history would have been to refer to the precedent of , a crucial moment when American policy could have supported indigenous Arab CONTENTS constitutional democracy—but, fatefully, did not. The Fallacy of Analogy: World War II as Americans’ t For the new administration, the Arabs’ experience of “justice interrupted” after World “Good War” 2 War I can still be a useful touchstone for promoting democracy in the region.1 This The Power of Precedent: Arabs’ Memory precedent alerts us that foreign intervention can spark a deep-seated and negative of World War I 3 political reaction in the postcolonial Arab world and that reform in Arab politics must Justice Interrupted: Arabs’ Response to Occupation 4 begin with respect for national sovereignty. It also reminds us that constitutional- Conclusion: The Use of Historical Precedent ism and the desire to participate in the community of international law are enduring in U.S. Policy 7 values in Arab politics. ABOUT THE INSTITUTE 5IF'BMMBDZPG"OBMPHZ8PSME8BS**BT"NFSJDBOTi(PPE8BSw The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, nonpartisan institution established and funded by During the last half-century, the most popular analogy Americans have used to justify Congress. Its goals are to help prevent and resolve war has been World War II. For Americans, it was a just war against an evil enemy that violent conflicts, promote post-conflict peacebuilding, concluded honorably with the benevolent postwar reconstruction of Japan and Ger- and increase conflict management tools, capacity, and many. In efforts to repeat the “Good War,” policymakers made analogies to World War intellectual capital worldwide. The Institute does this by II to plan and justify wars in Korea and Vietnam, even though these comparisons were 2 empowering others with knowledge, skills, and resources, not appropriate. as well as by its direct involvement in conflict zones Regarding Iraq, President George W. Bush first deployed an analogy to World War II in around the globe. his January 29, 2002, State of the Union address. He and his speechwriters deliberately used the term “axis of evil” when describing the link between terrorism and nuclear BOARD OF DIRECTORS weapons in order to invoke the Axis powers.3 In March 2003, on the eve of the Iraq J. Robinson West (Chair), Chairman, PFC Energy, Washington, invasion, Bush made the analogy even more explicit. He compared to %$t(FPSHF&.PPTF(Vice Chairman), Adjunct Professor Hitler and warned against appeasing him: “In this century, when evil men plot chemical, of Practice, The George Washington University, Washington, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind %$t"OOF)$BIO, Former Scholar in Residence, American never before seen on this earth.”4 6OJWFSTJUZ 8BTIJOHUPO %$t$IFTUFS"$SPDLFS, James R. Bush was not the first to use dramatic language to garner public support. Since the Schlesinger Professor of Strategic Studies, School of Foreign time of Woodrow Wilson, argues political scientist Jeffrey Tulis, presidents have used 4FSWJDF (FPSHFUPXO6OJWFSTJUZ 8BTIJOHUPO %$t*LSBN6 rhetoric to “go over the heads” of Congress and circumvent normal channels of delibera- ,IBO, President, Quality Care Consultants, LLC., Las Vegas, tive policymaking. In the hands of the press, Tulis argues, presidential rhetoric often /FWt,FSSZ,FOOFEZ )VNBO3JHIUT"DUJWJTUt4UFQIFO% takes on a life of its own.5 In Bush’s case, his World War II analogy not only precluded ,SBTOFS Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations consideration of policy alternatives inside his administration but also stoked a media BU4UBOGPSE6OJWFSTJUZt,BUIMFFO.BSUJOF[, Executive Director, frenzy that extended the analogy to other Middle East policy questions. Thomas Fried- 8PSME*OTUJUVUFPO%JTBCJMJUZt+FSFNZ"3BCLJO, Professor of man of provided a leading example when he called the terrorist -BX (FPSHF.BTPO6OJWFSTJUZ "SMJOHUPO 7Bt+VEZ7BO3FTU, attacks of September 11, 2001, “the Pearl Harbor of World War III,”6 and the Iraq inva- Executive Vice President, International Republican Institute, sion “the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since 8BTIJOHUPO %$t/BODZ;JSLJO, Executive Vice President, the Marshall Plan.”7 For Friedman and others, the analogy also supported comparisons of Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Muslim activists to Nazis, thus justifying a militant policy in the Islamic world. Historians, meanwhile, strongly criticized analogizing World War II to Iraq. John MEMBERS EX OFFICIO Dower, the premier scholar of postwar Japan’s reconstruction, correctly predicted before 3PCFSU.(BUFT %FQBSUNFOUPG%FGFOTFt)JMMBSZ3PEIBN the invasion that Iraq lacked critical elements that had enabled successful nation build- $MJOUPO 4FDSFUBSZPG4UBUFt3JDIBSE)4PMPNPO, President, ing in Germany and Japan.8 But at a time when expansive analogies to the Good War 6OJUFE4UBUFT*OTUJUVUFPG1FBDF OPOWPUJOH t'SBODFT$ captivated the public and media, he was ignored. 8JMTPO, Lieutenant General, U.S. Marine Corps; President, Indeed, in hindsight, the analogy is weak at best. Saddam was no Hitler: he com- National Defense University manded neither a powerful army nor a loyal party machine and had no weapons of mass destruction. While dismantling the Nazi Party and its membership was an important part of postwar political reconstruction in Germany, in Iraq, following the same policy by purging the Baath Party and its members produced an institutional vacuum that nearly ended hopes of establishing democratic rule of law. Six years after the inva- sion, the press and the new administration have finally abandoned the analogy to The views expressed in this report do not necessarily World War II.9 reflect the views of the United States Institute of Peace, But finding a better analogy is not easy. Valid comparisons between circumstances in which does not advocate specific policy positions. different times and places are extremely difficult to identify and justify, as any political To request permission to photocopy or reprint materials, scientist can attest. e-mail: [email protected] Historical precedent, however, is less prone to error. It is drawn directly from people’s historical experience and examines the past of a particular place where people today continue to experience the preceding event’s legacy through institutions, memory, and culture. As a result, precedent is a more certain indicator of how people of a particular region might respond to U.S. policy. Today, in 2009, the new administration could use historical precedent to set Middle East policy on a new track. The most powerful precedent, in the eyes of Iraqis and their Arab neighbors, is World War I, not World War II. At that time, Arabs rallied to President Woodrow Wilson’s promises of liberation and self-determination. After the war, Arabs convened a constitutional congress in a bid to build their own state upon the cinders

2 of the . Their representative at the Peace Conference, where they hoped to find support for their independent state, was the Arab Prince Faysal, friend of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). To Arabs, justice was denied when the British and French instead decided to occupy their lands. That point in Arab political history is as significant as the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor is in American history. Any new plan to promote democracy in the Arab world must begin by recouping this moment of “justice interrupted” ninety years ago.

5IF1PXFSPG1SFDFEFOU"SBCT.FNPSZPG8PSME8BS* For the peoples of the Ottoman Empire, including Arabs, World War I was as painful as it was for Europeans. One million Ottoman Armenians, who lived just north of , died in what would later be called the first genocide of the modern era. Another 500,000 civilians, mostly Arabs in Greater Syria, died of famine caused in large part by the Allies’ blockade. Three fourths of the Ottoman Empire’s adult male population had been drafted into the army; an untold number never returned home. Many Arabs rejoiced at the defeat of the Young Turks’ military regime. Like Arme- nians, they had feared annihilation under a Turkish military that regarded them as a fifth column. Some continued to seek an alliance with Turkish nationalist Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), but most believed that only full sovereignty, under a state committed to Arab welfare, could revive their devastated people. Hope came in newspapers handed from café to café and smuggled from town to town. In 1917, Egyptian papers had begun publishing full translations of President Wilson’s speeches, including the famous Four- teen Points speech of January 1918, which proclaimed the right of even the smallest nations to choose their governments. Rashid Rida, editor of the most popular Islamic journal of the day, The Lighthouse, wrote a letter to Wilson from urging him to block British occupation of Iraq and Palestine as a violation of Arabs’ right to national self-determination. Rida also wrote to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George expressing Arab fears that British rule would “efface from the surface of the earth.”10 The British had occupied Baghdad in March 1917 with a public proclamation that they came not as conquerors, but as liberators. Yet they banned publication of Wilson’s Fourteen Points in Baghdad until late The British had occupied 11 1918. Likewise, the British occupied in December 1917, keeping secret until Baghdad in March 1917 with the war’s end their promise to make a Jewish national home in Palestine. In January 1919, as Prince Faysal waited for a hearing at the Paris Peace Conference, a public proclamation that they Wilson was unsuccessful in convincing Britain and France to recognize small states. The came not as conquerors, Europeans insisted upon expanding their colonial empires, and Wilson did not wield the leverage to resist. He therefore consented to a compromise that gave Britain and but as liberators. France temporary control over areas in Africa and Asia in exchange for their support of his League of Nations. Yet evidence in his papers of 1919 suggests that Wilson hoped to use the league to renew his promise of self-determination to small states.12 Faysal finally got his hearing on February 6, 1919. “The Arab army fought to win its freedom. It lost heavily; some 20,000 were killed,” he told the Council of Ten, gathered that afternoon at the Quai d’Orsay. Arabs had earned the right to independence, he claimed, after suffering centuries of “slavery” under the Ottomans. A sovereign Arab state would welcome advice from the Great Powers and would serve Western interests: “The Arabs realized how much their country lacked development. But they wanted to be a link between East and West, to hand on Western civilization to Asia,” the prince explained.13 French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau responded with silence. President Wilson asked only whether Arabs would prefer a single mandate or to be divided among mul- tiple mandates. Faysal must have known then that Wilson’s new world order had already met its demise. But Wilson raised his hopes again a few days later, when he presented

 the Covenant of the League of Nations to the world. “We are done with annexations of helpless people,” Wilson told a Paris crowd. “The miasma of distrust, of intrigue, is cleared away. Men are looking eye to eye and saying: We are brothers and have a com- mon purpose.”14 Faysal returned to , Syria, in May 1919, and called for elections to a Syrian-Arab General Congress to write a constitution that would prove the Arab nation deserved to be free. More than 100 Arabs from regions soon to be divided into Pales- tine, Syria, Lebanon, and convened in Damascus.15 Arab elites told a delegation sent by Wilson that they preferred independence. Their second choice would be a U.S. mandate because Americans had “entered the war on behalf of the oppressed nations” and “believed, perhaps more than any other people, in the high possibilities of the League of Nations.”16 These Arab elites sought inclusion in the community of nation-states and inter- national law. They also sought a unified state that would secure their stability and prosperity. Prominent Lighthouse editor Rashid Rida warned that if the peace conference divided Arab lands into weak states, Muslim Arabs would conclude that at Paris, “right, justice, and freedom were only intended for Christians.”17 Rida’s fear that universal rights and international law might be applied unfairly reflected the history of European intervention in his lifetime. Since the late nineteenth century, Russia, Britain, France, and Austria had intervened to protect Christian and Jewish minorities not only out of altruistic concern but also as an excuse to expand their influence. The result was tyranny and inequality: The Ottomans used the European threat to their sovereignty to justify suspending the constitution, and Europeans and non-Muslims claimed legal and economic privileges that undermined the rule of law and aggravated social inequality. In Arab eyes, Britain’s deal-making with the French at Paris fit squarely in this nineteenth-century mold of self-serving intervention. In the fall of 1919, the British withdrew their troops from Syria in exchange for France’s approval of a British mandate to rule Palestine. The fates of small nations were, as Wilson had warned repeatedly in speeches, merely barter for the Great Powers.

+VTUJDF*OUFSSVQUFE"SBCT3FTQPOTFUP0DDVQBUJPO The Arabs in Damascus responded in March 1920 by proclaiming Faysal king of an inde- pendent constitutional called the Syrian Arab Kingdom. It claimed rule over the territory that Arabs believed Britain had promised them during the war, including modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and part of Palestine. The British disputed the promised borders, while the French insisted that Britain had promised Syria to them. The choice of a constitutional The choice of a constitutional monarchy was both a strategy to impress the Great monarchy was both a strategy Powers and a reflection of Arabs’ political experience. Arab elites had previously par- ticipated in constitutional regimes in 1860s Tunisia, 1876–78 Istanbul, 1882 , and to impress the Great Powers again in 1908–12 Istanbul. In Mount Lebanon, Arabs had lived under a locally elected and a reflection of Arabs’ council since 1860. Faysal himself had served as a deputy in the Istanbul Parliament. By 1920, in Arab experience and in newspapers, constitutionalism had become political experience. the accepted model of justice. Details of the congress’s deliberations demonstrate how Arabs, uncoached by Europe- ans, engaged in a democratic process. An opposition party, the Democratic Party, used populist appeals to its Damascus base to challenge Faysal’s Progressive Party, which attracted a cosmopolitan elite of Arab bureaucrats and officers from Baghdad, Arabia, Palestine, and Istanbul. The Democrats’ political language was more Islamic than Fay- sal’s, but also more democratic. With workers’ demonstrations and preachers’ sermons, they pressured Faysal’s regime to pursue a bottom-up program of reform.

 Under Democratic pressure, the congress limited royal power. When it crowned Faysal king in March 1920, it required him to pledge support for the rule of law, equality under the law, education for the people, and the award of government jobs based on merit. Faysal did not claim dynastic prerogative. To demonstrate that sovereignty lay with the people, citizens of the nation led the royal procession, and Faysal followed them.18 Faysal and his Progressive Party favored negotiating a compromise with the French that would give France an advisory role in the Arab kingdom; Democrats, however, opposed any concessions on sovereignty. When the British and French signed the San Remo Agreement, the Democrats gained the upper hand in the congress. On May 3, 1920, the congress elected Rashid Rida as its president. A native of Tripoli, Lebanon, he had left Cairo to join the congress in Damascus in late 1919. Although Rida belonged to the Progressive Party, he sympathized with Democrats who sought to guard Arabs’ full sovereignty. Faysal insisted that since he had first issued the call for a congress, it had to fol- low his foreign policy. Rida responded, “No! The Congress created you. . . . It was the Congress that made you King of Syria.”19 Islamic law, Rida told Faysal, required that sovereignty rest with the people. Rida then opened congressional debate on the con- stitution. In ten weeks, members ratified 148 articles.20 The constitution was the most democratic yet seen in the Middle East: It called for The constitution was the most the separation of powers, a strong legislature, and a bill of rights. Article 1 established democratic yet seen in the a secular regime with a capital at Damascus. In a concession to the Democrats, the congress agreed that the king must be Muslim. Other articles proclaimed freedom of Middle East: It called for the belief and faith; the equality of all Syrians (regardless of religion) under the law; and separation of powers, a strong freedoms of speech, press, and association—including opposition parties. The elected two-chambered legislature was to reserve one third of its seats for non-Muslims. Cabinet legislature, and a bill of rights. ministers were responsible to the legislature, not the king. Additional articles estab- lished judiciary independence. Against Democrats’ preference for strong citizens’ rights and a decentralized government, Faysal won a centralized bureaucracy and a commit- ment to expand state education.21 Most surprising, Progressives mustered majority support for women’s suffrage, despite the opposition’s noisy demonstrations outside their doors. However, the threat of European invasion, as in the past, once again curtailed the expansion of rights. Rida intervened to end the debate, arguing that the government could not afford to appear divided and weak when the French were poised to occupy Syria on the grounds that Faysal did not truly wield authority.22 With no time for further debate on indi- vidual articles, the congress ratified the constitution—with male suffrage only— in early . The congress aimed to demonstrate that they did not need oversight by a League of Nations mandate, which was designed to tutor peoples in self-government. The French, however, were not persuaded by the logic of the mandate system. They insisted on imposing the mandate to demonstrate that they were a power equal to Britain in the Middle East; French troops consequently gathered at the Lebanese border of Syria in early July. In a last act to defend Arab sovereignty, Rida led a delegation to King Faysal on July 19 urging him to reject France’s ultimatum to surrender or be occupied. Faysal denied their appeal to take up arms, but his telegram to French General Henri Gouraud went unanswered. Gouraud ordered his troops into Syria and in a single day defeated the Syrian-Arab army. In protest, Faysal invoked Wilson and the French Revolution: “This, my general, is a violation of the given word, and an act contrary to the rights of man and international morality.”23 Like Faysal, most Arabs regarded colonial occupation as a profound moral injustice. In response, they repudiated the authority of the League of Nations, which they had

 once seen as their protector, and resorted to force. In 1920, Syrian Arabs launched a revolt against France that would last through much of that decade. Iraqis staged their 1920 revolution against the British mandate, which they still consider the crucible of their political unity as a nation. , in the meantime, had mounted their 1919 revolution when the British refused to permit their delegation to travel to Paris; Egyp- tian protests would force the British in 1922 to end their formal protectorate, but not their occupation. Across the Arab world, the British and French allied with wealthy landowners and Bitter at the betrayal of their tribal chiefs to staunch demands for democratic politics and independence. Bitter at rights and universal, liberal the betrayal of their rights and universal, liberal standards of justice, most Arabs turned away from European tutelage and political models altogether. Support for Faysal disin- standards of justice, most tegrated since he was now associated with the hypocritical usage of international law Arabs turned away from to further imperial aims. Rida used his widely read The Lighthouse to criticize Europe bitterly. “Nobody, anymore, believes the word of Europeans, nor does anybody trust European tutelage and political them, or even perceive them to be qualified to exercise justice and virtue,” he wrote models altogether. in 1920.24 For Rida, this was a political about-face. In Damascus, he had called the consti- tutional monarchy an Islamic form of government. Now, he actively preached against the idea that Islam shared the same principles of justice with Christian Europe. In 1922–23, he serialized a book called The , which offered an Arab-Islamic model of government.25 True justice, he argued, lies in imitating the seventh-century Arab caliphate governed by successors to the Prophet Muhammad.26 Decades later, Rida’s arguments would inspire militant Islamic reformers like those in al-Qaeda to revive the Arab caliphate. In the short term, Rida directly inspired Hasan al-Banna, who in 1928 founded Egypt’s . The grandfather of all Arab-Islamist movements today, the brotherhood was not militant; it sought reform from within the political system and through public education. By the early 1940s, it had become the largest political move- ment in Egypt by attracting middle-class Egyptians who felt shut out of politics run by a Westernized elite. They embraced Banna’s call for cultural sovereignty in addition to political sovereignty. In dress, law, education, and social life, they wanted to replace European models with Islamic equivalents. Meanwhile, the British called Faysal from exile in Italy in 1921 after defeating the Iraqi revolution and installed him as king of Iraq. From his throne, Faysal watched as British forces built the most oppressive regime in the Arab world. The Iraqi constitution of 1925, like Egypt’s of 1923, was written by the British to safeguard their own interests through the royal court. In contrast to the 1920 Syrian constitution, it granted little power to the legislature or minorities. The British used rigged elections, land grants, tax exemptions, and feudal laws to create a loyal class of landowners with control over an increasingly landless peasant majority.27 As a consequence, the Communist Party became the most popular political movement in Iraq by the 1940s and 1950s. In Syria, meanwhile, nationalists looked across their border to independent Turkey, where Mustafa Kemal used the full power of the state to promote social reform and economic growth. The French mandate in Syria, by contrast, spent little on social development. Like the British in Egypt and Iraq, the French imposed a constitution that protected their power and used fixed elections and patronage to build a loyal class of landed elites. By the 1940s, mass political movements had emerged across the Arab world that promoted statist ideologies like Kemal’s in Turkey. Islamists, Communists, and Baathists offered variations on revolutionary visions to uproot the French, British, and their privileged elite. All of these movements posited a distinctively Eastern—Arab or Muslim—model of justice against Western liberalism. The new mass movements rejected European liberalism as inherently unjust and impe- rialist. But they did not reject the constitutional ideal. In this sense, they expressed a

 feeling of “justice interrupted” that foresaw a future restoration of constitutionalism once sovereignty was regained. Banna’s vision of an retained the principles of representative government. He advocated a measured reform of Egypt’s 1923 constitution to revise only those articles that directly contradicted modernist interpretations of Islamic law.28 The Baath Party in Syria viewed Islam as the cultural expression of both Muslim and Christian Arabs, whose society had predated the rise of the religion. In this way, Baathists sought a basis for equality between Muslims and Christians in the tolerant spirit of the 1920 constitution. The Iraqi Communist Party listed “a democratic order” with an elected parliament as its second priority, after the top priority of political and economic sovereignty.29 The who had joined the 1920 Syrian-Arab General Congress, by contrast, failed utterly to build a sustained political response to the European betrayal of 1919. In the 1920s, Palestinians petitioned the British for the national right to self-determina- tion to little effect. In 1936, the Palestinians turned to armed revolt. Syrian, Iraqi, and Egyptian Arabs joined that fight, as well as the Palestinian war against Israel in 1948. The United Nations’ inability, or unwillingness, to secure a state for Palestinians sym- bolized for all Arabs their exclusion from full and equal membership in the community of international law and human rights. Arab resentment over this injustice is the most enduring political legacy of 1919. Colonial inequality and its reinforcement during the Cold War would finally drive leaders to abandon constitutional government in the 1950s. Fear of the colonial elite’s tyranny pushed democratic movements underground and inspired military officers to stage coups in 1949 Syria, 1952 Egypt, and 1958 Iraq, where Fayal’s own grandson died. The Iraqi Free Officers proclaimed themselves as representatives of the popular will who would bring justice denied to Iraqis under the corrupt British-penned constitution. Their revolutionary manifesto stated, once again, the belief that sovereignty would restore justice: “We have undertaken to liberate the homeland from the corrupt crew that imperialism installed. Power shall be entrusted to a government emanating from you and inspired by you.”30 However, the revolutionary leader, Abdul Karim Qasim, was over- thrown in the 1963 coup, which launched forty years of Baathist dictatorship in Iraq. Similar tensions produced near civil war in 1958 Lebanon and Jordan, where conser- vative, colonial-era elites prevailed with U.S. support. Politics in and the Gulf followed a different trajectory, in part because Arabs there had participated little in constitutional government. With the blessings of the British, they founded mon- archies with few constitutional constraints. During and after World War II, American leaders tacitly consented to British and French repression of democracy. While Arabs had While Arabs had praised praised Wilson and U.S. anticolonialism through the 1930s, American standing in the Wilson and U.S. anticolonialism Middle East consequently plummeted in the wake of decolonization. The contrasting cases of Turkey and Iran, which escaped direct colonial rule, under- through the 1930s, American score the link between foreign occupation and the demise of constitutionalism as an standing in the Middle East ideal. After Mustafa Kemal’s death in 1938, Turks revived constitutional politics and in 1950 conducted the republic’s first true democratic election. Iranians, too, revived consequently plummeted in their 1906 constitution in the 1940s and again in the 1979 revolution against the Shah; the wake of decolonization. the constitution of the of Iran combines elements of the French Fifth Republic with the religious authority of a Supreme Islamic Leader. Commitment to con- stitutionalism remained unbroken in these two countries, which are more democratic than their previously colonized Arab neighbors.

$PODMVTJPO5IF6TFPG)JTUPSJDBM1SFDFEFOUJO641PMJDZ The betrayal of 1919–20 remains a touchstone in Arab politics today. Memoirs and histories of the Faysal era are still popular in Damascus bookstores. The Syrian-Arab

7 General Congress launched the modern era of Arab politics, a Syrian historian argued in 2000: “Its relevance continues today, in our need to return to it as a precedent for a society confronting itself and the world after a long period of negation under foreign occupation.”31 In Baghdad, too, Iraqis commonly recite with bitterness Gen. Stanley Maude’s broken promise of March 1917 that the British army came not “as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.”32 Exactly eighty-six years later, President Bush used the same sentence, a Baghdadi reminded a Washington Post reporter on the eve of the American invasion.33 Even Iraqis who supported the invasion urged Americans to withdraw quickly. “Fear of foreign intervention has been a central theme of Iraqi politics, literature and art ever since the country came into being after the First World War,” wrote Awad Nasir, an exiled Iraqi poet, in April 2003 to the National Review Online. “Rightly or wrongly, most Iraqis believe that their sufferings are, at least in part, a direct result of the support given by foreign powers to the various despots who seized and exercised power in Baghdad.” He and other Iraqis believed that their country’s strong middle class would support democ- ratization without U.S. tutelage. In an eerie echo of Faysal’s plea in Paris, Nasir argued: “A democratic and prosperous Iraq under a government of its choosing could become [the] only true friend of the United States in the Arab world.”34 While Nasir and his fellow Iraqi citizens revived the Wilsonian perspective of 1919, Americans remained tuned to the story of World War II. In May 2003, Coalition Provi- sional Authority head Paul Bremer preempted the quick transfer of power by following the World War II script of de-Nazification. After he disbanded the Iraqi army and purged the civilian bureaucracy of Baathists, there was virtually no state left to restore to Iraqi sovereignty. Bremer’s policy gave an opening to what Nasir had feared most: the inter- vention of neighboring powers and the revolt of indigenous opponents of democracy.35 The Iraqi middle class, which was supposed to be the backbone of democracy, fled to exile under threat of insurgent attack. The 2005 Iraqi constitution was a “catastrophe,” wrote political scientist Nathan J. Brown, because it was imposed by a small group of high-minded politicians from above. It did not represent the reconciliation of opposing interests, nor did it prevent civil war.36 American guidance proved counterproductive. By 2005, most Iraqis viewed Americans as occupiers, not liberators, and, as one scholar put it, they “chafed at having U.S. efforts at nation building to draft a constitution under U.S. supervision.”37 U.S. efforts at nation building in Iraq in Iraq have resembled more have resembled more the failure of the post–World War I mandates than the success of post–World War II Japan and Germany. the failure of the post–World Under a new administration, and with the withdrawal agreement ratified, U.S. poli- War I mandates than the cymakers must find an alternative to the World War II analogy; conditions are ripe for a paradigm shift.38 Understanding Arabs’ enduring sense of “justice interrupted” since success of post–World War II World War I can help create a better policy in Iraq and the Middle East, one that would Japan and Germany. respect Arabs’ conviction that sovereignty is a prerequisite to justice. It would, as the Iraq Study Group recommended in 2006, create the space for democratic politics by using regional diplomacy to secure Iraq’s borders from destabilizing interference. Iraqis might then hammer out, as Arabs did in 1920 Damascus, a living constitution. The World War I precedent, however, warns that the United States cannot simply roll back the clock. The effects of British rule—notably the lack of experience with constitutional government and economic inequality—raised obstacles to democratic government that had not handicapped the Syrian-Arab Congress in 1920. By 2003, Iraq resembled other postcolonial countries with weak states and deep social divisions. As a consequence, simply reforming government institutions is unlikely to promote a stable democracy, warns political scientist David Waldner.39 What historians can tell foreign policymakers today is that the door not chosen in 1919 is still partly open; that justice interrupted can be restored. Wilson’s vision of a world governed by international law survives in Arab memory as a promise yet to be

8 fulfilled. While the conditions of 1920 cannot be retrieved, Arabs’ memory of betrayal must be taken seriously—and can become the basis for a new approach to U.S. policy. Even Bush’s advisers recognized that Americans’ decision to imitate colonial practice in the Cold War—by buying the loyalty of dictators—had led to radical militarism, not stability. Indeed, Arab politicians still make the same demands for the rights denied them ninety years ago out of an enduring desire to be on equal terms in the interna- tional arena.40 Arab-Islamic movements, beneath their outward anti-Westernism, also retain Rida’s commitment to the constitutional principles of representation and equality before the law. American policymakers who recognize the power of this historical prec- edent can begin to restore the mutual respect and shared values of justice that Arabs and Americans enjoyed nearly a century ago.

 /PUFT 1. Term adapted from Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997). 2. Ernest R. May, “Lessons” of the Past (New York: Oxford, 1973); Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). 3. Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2004), 86–87. 4. See: www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030317-7.html (accessed May 7, 2009). 5. Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). 6. , “Foreign Affairs: World War III,” New York Times, September 13, 2001. 7. Thomas Friedman, “The Chant Not Heard,” New York Times, November 30, 2003. 8. John W. Dower, “A Warning from History: Don’t Expect Democracy in Iraq,” Boston Review (February/March 2003). See: www.bostonreview.net/BR28.1/dower.html (accessed May 7, 2009). 9. See, for example, Jeffrey Record, “The Use and Abuse of History: Munich, Vietnam, and Iraq,” Survival 49:1 (Spring 2007): 163–80; Evan Thomas, “The Mythology of Munich,” , June 14, 2008. 10. Eliezer Tauber, “Rashid Rida’s Political Attitudes during World War I,” The 85:1–2 (January–April 1995): 118. 11. Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq 1914–1932 (London: Ithaca Press, 1976), 19; David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 306 12. See The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 54: January 11–February 7, 1919, Arthur S. Link, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 265–68, 293–94, 303–30, and 350–61. On Wilson’s progressive internationalism, see Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 31–47 and 210–36. 13. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 54, 505–09. 14. Knock, 225. 15. Malcolm B. Russell The First Modern Arab State: Syria under Faysal, 1918–1920 (Minneapolis: Biblioteca Islamica, 1985), 61–63, says 85 were elected and 35 were appointed. Mari Almaz Shahristan, al-Mu’tamar al-Suri al-‘Amm 1919–20 (: Dar al-Amwaj, 2000), 37–42, says sources range from 89 to 107 elected delegates. 16. Harry N. Howard, The King-Crane Commission (Beirut: Khayat’s, 1963), 228, 108, and 235–36. 17. Tauber, “Rashid Rida’s Political Attitudes during World War I,” 119. 18. James L. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998), 247–52. 19. Eliezer Tauber, “Rashid Rida and Faysal’s Kingdom in Syria,” The Muslim World 85:3–4 (July–October 1995): 241. 20. Shahristan, 179–94. Text: Jama’at al-Duwal al-‘Arabiyya, Disatir al-Bilad al-‘Arabiyya (1955), 3–22. 21. Russell, 149. 22. Gelvin, 188–215; Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 117–20; Shahristan, 194–208 (especially Rida’s comments, 205–06). 23. Russell, 187. 24. Emad Eldin Shahin, “Muhammad Rashid Rida’s Perspectives on the West as Reflected in al-Manar,” The Muslim World 79:2 (1989): 129. Shahin cites the source of the quote as al-Manar XXII (1920), 398. 25. Mahmoud Haddad, “Arab Religious Nationalism in the Colonial Era: Rereading Rashid Rida’s Ideas on the Caliphate,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 117:2 (April–June 1997): 253–77. 26. Al-Shaykh Muhammad Rashid Rida, Al-Khalifa (Cairo: al-Zahra’ al-I’lam al-‘Arabi, 1988), 6. 27. Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 30–147; Samira Haj, The Making of Iraq 1900–63 (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1997), 1–109. 28. Hasan al-Banna, Mudhakkirat al-Da’wah wa al-Da’iyah (Beirut: Maktabat al-Islami, 1974), 259–60 and “Risalat al-Mu’tamar al-Khamis” in Majmu’at Risa’il al- al-Shahid Hasan al-Banna (Beirut: Dar al-Andalus, 1965), 274–79. See also Ahmad S. Moussalli, “Hasan al-Banna’s Islamist Discourse on Constitutional Rule and the ,” Journal of Islamic Studies 4:2 (1993): 161–74. 29. “A Free Homeland and a Happy People,” translation of April 1945 booklet, Baghdad Legation to State Department, Washington, Dispatch 783, June 21, 1945. 30. Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 802. Batatu also gives a good summary of Baathist ideology in the 1950s, 730–48, and of Baathists’ loss of Shiite support and greater reliance on the military after 1968, 1073–1110. See also John F. Devlin, The Baath Party (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1976), 1–5, 23–42, 119–20 and Gelvin, 287–97. 31. Shahristan, 214. See also Khariyya Qasimiyya, al-Hukuma al-‘Arabiya fi Dimashq bayna 1918–20 (Beirut: Mu’assassat al-‘Arabiyya lil-Dirasat wa al-Nashr, 1982); Muhammad M. Arna’ut, Dirasat

10 Hawla al-Hukuma /al-Dawla al-’Arabiya fi Dimashq 1918–20 (Amman: Dar al-Shuruq lil-Nashr wa Tawzi’, 2000), 63–70; Abdul-Karim Rafeq, Tarikh al-Jami’ah al-Suriyyah (Damascus: Maktabat Nubil, 2004). 32. See: wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/The_Proclamation_of_Baghdad (accessed May 7, 2009). On British lack of planning, parallel to the Americans’ in 2003, see also Fromkin, 306; Sluglett, 9–18; and Tripp, 30–39. 33. Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 17. Bush’s ultimatum to Saddam on March 17, 2003, was translated and broadcast in Iraq. It mentioned the words “liberty,” “liberation,” “free,” and “freedom” in relation to Iraq eight times. (See URL cited above.) Bush’s March 19, 2003, speech, made upon the invasion of Iraq, said: “We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.” See: georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030319-17.html (accessed May 7, 2009). 34. Awad Nasir, “Our Choosing,” National Review Online (April 7, 2003). See: www.nationalreview.com/ comment/comment-nasir040703.asp (accessed May 7, 2009). 35. Awad Nasir, “Thank You: An Iraqi Poet Celebrates the Dictator’s Fall,” (May 8, 2003). See: www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110003465 (accessed May 7, 2009). 36. Nathan J. Brown, “Reason, Interest, Rationality, and Passion in Constitution Drafting,” Perspectives on Politics 6:4 (December 2008): 675–89. 37. Ann Elizabeth Mayer, “The Fatal Flaws in the U.S. Constitutional Project for Iraq,” Journal of International Affairs 61:1 (Fall/Winter 2007): 153–70. 38. See Jeffrey W. Legro, “Whence American Internationalism,” International Organization 54:2 (Spring 2000): 253–89. 39. Brown, 675–89; David Waldner, “The Limits of Institutional Engineering: Lessons From Iraq,” USIP Special Report 222 (May 2009); Mayer, 153–70. 40. On the need for more diplomatic history using Arabic sources, see Nathan J. Citino, “Out of the Blue? Historical Scholarship on U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East,” OAH Magazine of History (May 2006): 8–12.

11 An online edition of this and related 0G3FMBUFE*OUFSFTU reports can be found on our Web site (www.usip.org), together with additional t The Limits of Institutional Engineering: Lessons from Iraq by David Waldner (Special information on the subject. Report, May 2009) t Land, Property, and the Challenge of Return for Iraq’s Displaced by Deborah Isser and Peter Van der Auweraert (Special Report, April 2009) t Iraq, its Neighbors, and the Obama Administration: Syrian and Saudi Perspectives by the Iraq and its Neighbors initiative (Working Paper, February 2009) t The Treasury Approach to State-Building and Institution-Strengthening Assistance: Expe- rience in Iraq and Broader Implications by Jeremiah S. Pam (Special Report, October 2008) t Reconciliation Strategies in Iraq by David A. Steele (Special Report, October 2008) t Political Progress in Iraq during the Surge, by Rend Al-Rahim Francke (Special Report, August 2007) t Iraq’s New Political Map by Phebe Marr (Special Report, January 2007)

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